Porpentine

Oakland, California, United States

With Those We Love Alive is weirdfem dark fantasy where you design artifacts for a skull empress. It was made in Twine. Sometimes you draw on yourself with marker.

Hundreds of people have submitted pics of their sigils, which you can see here:
http://porpentine.tumblr.com/tagged/glory-2-with-those-we-love-alive

It's inspired by mob violence, trash struggle, C-PTSD, and child abuse. It's also inspired by friendship between trash girls. In most media there’s an unspoken belief that feminine lifeforms can't survive on their own, can't have spaces of their own, can’t have relationships of their own. I try to go against this with basically everything I make.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape's games and curation have contributed to the popularity of the accessible game design software Twine. She's won the XYZZY and Indiecade awards, had her work displayed at EMP Museum and The Museum of the Moving Image, and been profiled by the New York Times, commissioned by Vice and Rhizome, and she is a 2016 Creative Capital Emerging Fields awardee.

Brenda Neotenomie is a composer, graphic artist, and game designer. Her works include Bellular Hexatosis and the OST for With Those We Love Alive.

Twine, browser-based game (uses sound)

Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive is a Twine game that invites the reader to become physically involved through marking up their own body with symbols throughout play. As a Twine game, the work relies primarily on text and audio along with backgrounds of shifting colors to draw the player into a disturbing science fiction landscape. The game opens with a level of customization that invites the player to become connected and even embedded into the game, choosing their month of birth, element, and eye color. As the player becomes a servant to a monstrous larval queen, the stage is set for a dystopia of dream-like and vivid yet mundane violence. After playing, the reader has a tangible record of their own choices and identity beliefs in the drawings on one’s skin.

Downloadable Work Archive
Description : Work archive
Requirements : Modern web browser (such as Chrome)